On Tuesday (Aug. 25), thousands of fans marked the 25th anniversary of the tragic death of “the Princess of R&B,” Aaliyah. In an interview published that same day, Dame Dash shared how his former girlfriend felt uneasy before boarding the plane that ultimately killed her.
“She texted me saying, ‘I don’t like the plane.’ I told her, ‘Don’t get on it,’” Dame Dash said in the interview with US Weekly, which covered Aaliyah’s final days from those close to her. “However, she said she had to do it for the video,” he continued. “She knew the plane wasn’t right, and she was always scared of planes.”
Aaliyah was in the Bahamas, shooting the Hype Williams-directed video for “Rock The Boat,” the second single from her self-titled third album, which was released on July 2, 2001. The album was already a smash hit, debuting at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 charts.
Her schedule had her set to fly back to Florida after the shoot on the 26th, but she opted to return a day early, despite a well-known fear of flying. “Every single time, she was scared,” Dash said of Aaliyah’s fear. “She always took a satin pillow with her. She called it her good-luck pillow.”
The businessman felt that her desire to get back to be with him motivated her to fly out a day early. “She said, ‘I am just going to do this video then come right back,’” Dash said to US Weekly.
In the 2022 biography Baby Girl: Better Known As Aaliyah by Kathy Iandoli, an eyewitness named Kingsley Russell shared that Aaliyah voiced her worries about the plane and was given a pill after complaining of a headache.
The account from Russell, who was working for a transportation company, also detailed how the singer was carried onto the twin-engine Cessna 402B while she was still asleep.
Dame Dash still considers Aaliyah as his soulmate. “We are still together today. We’ll never not be together,” the Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder said. “If she were still with us and we were together as a team, we would be like Jay-Z and Beyoncé. I think she might be the most celebrated artist if she were still alive.”
